For me, it's the portability/size.

I don't have a benchtop I can use just for soldering, so my soldering toolkit lives in a box with all it needs. When I wanna do some work, I pick up the box, open it, and most of the stuff gets used directly out of it.

I put a silicone mat on a table, pull out the copper scrub and iron holder, and work on whatever pcb. When it's done, I can pack it all in the box and store it.

A TS80 is portable enough to fit in the box. A full on station would be a bit harder.

On windows it's the same. Although I think I usually install ipython outside of virtualenvs, because I tend to always use it.

I'd like to propose another use case: HUDs.

I've recently took up cycling to work and back, and would love to have speed/gears/time up on the glasses, instead of having to look and focus down. Riding my scooter would also be better with it, since the speedometer and turning light indicators are a bit out of my normal field of vision.

Also, be able to see who's calling on the cell phone would be a plus (I've found that having the phone 'say' who's calling results in a jumble that I can't make heads or tails of, as most of the names are not English names)

Yes! Integrating it with your car to see gas (or battery) levels. No integration needed to see speed, directions, stop lights, traffic, construction ahead. You could take it one step further and crowd-source to find stolen cars or license-plates.

>You could take it one step further and crowd-source to find stolen cars or license-plates. //

So it seems Orwell didn't anticipate that we would carry the cameras that spy on us with us ... take it a couple more steps further and the secret service have a system where they can look through anyone's [with smart-glasses] eyes at what they're seeing.

Imagine Boston if after the bombing the authorities could requisition the view of everyone over the previous hour (cached for your convenience) and run that through a mapping program that can literally recreate the 3D scene with peoples movements and interactions for that whole period. Awesome power.

One critical feature would be local storage of recorded video. It would be a huge invasion of privacy to pull images from innocent people, even if it is for the greater good, maybe. I don't know which side of the privacy debate I'm on. If there is unlimited transparency for citizens then there should be 100% transparency for the government, that's the only way.

The 3D mapping thing has already been done. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1209.5982v1.pdf

I actually solved the "get the data out from the homebanking system" via 100 lines of javascript executed in phantomjs to screenscrape the site.

It isn't pretty, it might break, and I haven't looked into how to store the credentials "safely" (so it executes just when I call it and enter the u/p, and not in the background), but it beats the hell out of logging in and extracting the data by hand.

You might get some mileage of this, if you want to automate the data extraction and have an homebanking account.

I actually did consider this option and technically it's probably not too difficult.

On the other hand I'd hate to get used to using this and then have them do some obfuscation deliberately to stop me.

I'd also be somewhat paranoid that if my bank figured it out then they'd come down on me like a ton of bricks and use some convoluted law to freeze my account or send me to prison for "hacking the bank" or somesuch.

Just to give my 2c, EF is not so much an alternative to Dapper/Massive/PetaPoco as an alternative to NHibernate.

Both are "heavy-duty" orms, while those 3 are more lightweight. My personal view is that for writes and maintaining a domain model, NH (or EF, but I prefer NH) is a good option, and when you need performance or just want a light layer to ease the mappings from sql to objects, micro-orms are the best option.

Mine doesn't crash on Web projects, but can't work for a couple of hours on a Windows Phone 7 project without it going boom.

I think most of it works fine and dandy, but some parts can be quite sensitive.

Fair enough, I haven't worked on any Windows Phone 7 stuff yet, so it may be fatally brittle there.

If you end up trying to setup git on a linux machine, two things:

- setup or have available another linux machine to act as a "client". git on windows with ssh can be a bit fidgety sometimes, and that would help you debug whether it's a client or server issue.

- do look at gitolite for managing the repos [1]. Its "simple" to install, and the features it brings to the table are awesome (from private 'scratch' repos to auth and key management, and several others).

[1] - https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite#_quick_install

I used to struggle with it too, until some time ago I think it all kind of clicked in place.

Don't try and think of it as similar to other shells like bash, but as an interactive console for objects. The operators, flow mechanisms and semantics make a lot of sense from that perspective, at least to me.

I've found that in that capacity, and as soon as I grokked the object pipeline, it's a wonderful tool with access to the entire .net ecosystem and a really hard push from Microsoft to have support for it on most of their tools

I've been automating several procedures with it and it's been working great.

That said, I also have some (iron)python scripts for some other tasks that don't involve as much glue between applications and services.

Actually, if you look at other posts from Sam mentioning dapper you'll find that they profiled the site and found some bottlenecks also on the translator from the datareader to objects on linq2sql. Since they're going to hand-write the sql then they're going to take advantage of that really fast microorm instead of sticking with l2q.

I think you're on to something with "only one member is virtual" and previous experience.

Communication is essencial and harder to manage if just one member is virtual. So, it may not be worthwhile to manage just that one member differently, hence the requirment for "on-site" programming.